00:00I'm going to come to regime change again in just a moment.
00:04But first, I want to ask you, Ava, the U.S. had invested heavily in Venezuelan oil infrastructure until it was pulled out from under them in the 70s.
00:14So is President Trump right in some sense, claiming that Venezuela stole the U.S. assets?
00:23No, not at all. And that's mischaracterized because there was a process that the U.S. was a part of.
00:29It was a time period when the U.S. was actually heavily involved in helping to build Venezuela's democracy at that time
00:38and was involved in the decision-making process and the negotiations that took place back then in 1976 when the industry was formally nationalized.
00:50And U.S. companies remained as some of the major players in Venezuela over the years.
00:55And in fact, it was in the 90s when there were efforts underway, which is actually what propelled Chávez to power in the first place,
01:04that this massive movement that built up in Venezuela in the 1990s backing him,
01:11because he had led an attempted coup d'etat in 1992 against President Carlos Andrés Pérez way back then.
01:20And he was in prison for it at the time.
01:22And then this movement built up around, because precisely there were efforts underway to privatize, once again, the oil industry.
01:30Poverty was growing to a massive extent throughout Venezuela, upwards of 80 percent poverty.
01:36And the majority of people were excluded from any part of the political process.
01:42It was, you know, this very sort of corrupted system of power sharing amongst the two major parties, not unlike what we have in the United States.
01:51But in any case, when – so oil was nationalized before, and the U.S. was a party to the process,
01:57and there were no complaints that anything had been stolen.
02:02In the 2000s, 2006, 2007, Chávez did – he did some further nationalizations, not just of the oil industry,
02:12but also there were others internally with electricity and other of the major resources and utilities.
02:17And there were some U.S. companies, like ExxonMobil primarily, ConocoPhillips, that were against those harsher restrictions on the –
02:28oil was already nationalized, but they increased the ownership that Pelevesa, Venezuela State Oil Company,
02:33had to have over the joint ventures.
02:37Okay.
02:37And Exxon and ConocoPhillips left.
02:40But remember, the major oil company in Venezuela today is from the U.S., and it's Chevron.
02:46And there's – you know, they're still getting the oil from Venezuela and supplying it within the United States.
02:52So the concept that there was some theft is ridiculous.
02:56There were court cases.
02:57There were settlements.
02:58There were things that are still unsettled.
03:00But there was never any theft because you can't steal something that doesn't belong to you.
03:04Something can be stolen from you that didn't belong to you in the first place.
